Renaissance literary theory and practice

by Charles Sears Baldwin

Instead of being ruled out as merely Dryden’s preoccupation with French seventeenth-century “regularity,” this may well be pondered. Later criticism of the romantic period, indeed, was inclined to reply: “What of it? The Faerie Queene offers so much else that we are content to dispense with uniformity of design.” But still later criticism has not been so sure; and, what is more important, many readers have balked. The poem does not carry through. Today those who have read the six books are inclined to boast. Doubtless the forming of a gentleman has less appeal as an idea than Tasso’s common enterprise of deliverance. Certainly the poetic machinery of knight errantry allegorized as the triumphs of virtues over vices has less appeal than crusade. Motive and method are insufficient to integrate the Faerie Queene and carry it forward. Its very timeliness has faded into insularity. Don Quixote, full of seventeenth-century Spain, is significant to the whole western world; the Faerie Queene is sometimes significant only in terms of Tudor politics. But probably the main reason for the waning of the Faerie Queene is the insufficiency of the conception to animate a long poem and of the composition to carry it forward. Beside Paradise Lost, to say nothing of the Divina Commedia, it is seen to have “no uniformity of design” in the sense of lacking effective integration.

Chapter VI
DRAMA

Revival of drama is not a Renaissance achievement. The Renaissance has no drama distinctively its own. Even the sixteenth century prolonged a period of transition. Elizabethan comedy found new ways only in its last decade; Elizabethan tragedy, French tragedy and tragicomedy, matured in the seventeenth century. Medieval sacred plays continued, and the moralities proved too feeble dramatically to survive. Court shows of various kinds and degrees did, indeed, experiment dramatically with mythology, pastoral, and even rustic realism; but quite generally they lingered in allegory and pageantry, and their dramatic successes did not widen dramaturgy till 1590. While it practiced popular drama in mystère and miracle, the Middle Age had repeated that definition of drama which made it not so much a distinct form of composition as a style. This conception persisted through the Renaissance, especially in tragedy. Tragedy was still the fall of a prince; and it was rather a dialogue in high style than a sequence of action on the stage. Renaissance tragedy was classicized, indeed, in style; but in composition it remained as immune to the example of the Greek tragedians as the poetics[41] to the theory of Aristotle. It still imitated Seneca and quoted the “Ars poetica” of Horace. Often it was not even intended for the stage.

Comedy had better auspices and somewhat earlier development. Plautus and Terence, already familiar to the Middle Age, had the great advantage of being acted. Latin school plays, translations, imitations, kept before the Renaissance the pattern of Latin Comedy. Narrow and conventional, but definite and stirring, this had been found adaptable to the fabliau situations of medieval farce, and was still active. Indeed, it was the starting point of many a Renaissance dramatist. Until Greek tragedy finally became active in dramaturgy, the only classical model for play composition that went beyond Seneca was Latin Comedy.

1. SACRED PLAYS

The most widespread stage drama of the fifteenth century was medieval. Mystère and miracle, sacre rappresentazioni, continued, indeed, well into the sixteenth century. The Annales d’Aquitaine of Jean Bouchet is quite specific.

The King of France, by his letters patent issued the 18th day of January, 1533, commanded all the nobles of Poitou ... to appear with such [troops and equipment] as they owed for his service in the following May; and the review (monstres) was before the Seneschal of Poitou in the city of Poitiers.... On the 14th of July the mayor, échevins, and bourgeois of Poitiers also gave their review for the king’s service in the aforesaid city. And on the morrow were made joyous and triumphal presentations (monstres) of the mysteries of the Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of our Savior Jesus Christ, and of the mission given by the Holy Spirit, which mysteries were played for a fortnight in the old market of the aforesaid city, in a theater built most triumphally around it (en un théatre fait en rond, fort triomphant). And the aforesaid play began on Sunday, the 19th day of the aforesaid month, and lasted continuously for the eleven days following, wherein were very good actors and richly costumed.... The Passion and Resurrection were played also three weeks afterward, or thereabouts, in the city of Saumur, where I saw excellent acting (page 473 of the edition of 1644).

This description applies in essentials to the English Corpus Christi cycles, which we have in fifteenth-century texts, and to the general European tradition. What was that tradition in terms of drama? Typically a saint’s legend (miracle) is less available for a play than a Bible story. The external life of a saint represented as a series of trials may be unwieldy or monotonous. The great moments of the Magdalen, indeed, have as clear stage possibilities as the sacrifice of Isaac; but generically the miracles yielded less effective drama than the mystères. The distinction between the two soon ceased to be current in England; there the word miracle came to be applied to either. Mystère, applied as above to Incarnation, Nativity, Passion, and so forth, refers more properly to a series than to a single play. Was there drama, then, in a whole series of sacred plays?